General Discussion Thread

[Róisín]

Yep, that one, and a number of closely related species which seem mostly to have come in with pine trees imported for plantations. All the golden and brown boletes are edible, but they vary from tasting like cardboard to being meltingly delicious. We have native ceps, but they tend to be huge and bad tasting. We also found some native truffles (called ‘kangaroo balls’ in these parts), and my favourites of all the forest fungi here: saffron milk caps. No morels yet, sadly. We are having steak and mushrooms with jacket potatoes tonight.

[midwestmutt]

Here Roisin, have some virtual morels courtesy of a friend of mine, since the hills have gotten too steep for me and all my hunting grounds have been bought up and posted.

[Lenny]

There's only a few days left, but Summer Games Done Quick is running at the moment!

If you haven't heard of Games Done Quick yet, it's a really wholesome gaming event run twice a year, once in winter, once in summer. It's a week-long speedrunning marathon event, 24/7, that raises money for Doctors Without Borders and Prevent Cancer Foundation. They've branched out with a ton of off-season content in the form of daily Hotfixes and other twice-yearly events like Frame Fatales (runners that identify as a woman in some way only, raising money for Malala Fund).

They're events I look forward to every time, and it's been the most wholesome and welcoming thing I've found in the gaming community, and online as a whole, in years<3 Highly recommended if you have any interest in speedrunning and/or games, and people having fun while raising money for good causes.

[Róisín]

midwestmutt, those look very tasty! Something I try to teach foraging classes is to tell true morels from false morels. Fortunately we don’t have many false morels around here. I enjoy foraging, especially for fungi. I had feared our local morels had all died off, but last year they came back after bushfires. They do tend to be a fire following fungus. After not seeing any in the local forests for years, I had just about given up on finding them again, when one of the Farmers Market customers turned up with some nice specimens, which had come up in the burned pine bark mulch a few months after a fire had burned through his garden. He was very happy to find out what they were.

[midwestmutt]

People go nuts for them every Spring. I used to scour the hills and fill grocery bags of them. When I was young we had a huge die-off of elm trees from Dutch Elm disease. Morels seemed to love dead elms. All you had to do was look for them and start searching around them.

[Jitter]

One of the ’false morels’, korvasieni (”ear mushroom”) the Gyromitra esculenta, known in English for example as ”brain mushroom” is both deadly and delicious. If prepared correctly it is very very good, but if it’s just fried for example one is enough to kill several people! It’s a well known delicacy here in Finland and Scandinavia, but at least it’s not sold by the pound with no warning anymore, like it was when I was a kid. Because hay everybody knows it has to boiled thoroughly several times before it can be eaten! (Just make sure to pour away the water, and not breathe in the fumes…)

Makes one wonder how it was ever discovered to be edible in the first place. Anyways it’s good! Just not to be eaten too often.

[Róisín]

Jitter, I remember that one from Europe. To be treated with extreme caution! Though properly treated it can be delicious, as you say. But being a person who errs on the side of caution, I don’t eat false morels unless there is nothing else.

Here in South Australia we have some huge thunder storms at the moment - lots of lightning strikes. So far only brief power outages, but I am prepared for worse and longer ones. I have fuel, water and food which can be easily cooked on the woodstove withindoors already, and plenty of lamps and candles ready, with batteries in the torches. I just hope that the band of weather passing over us has moderated by the time it drifts the 500 miles/800 kilometres east to where Yastreb lives. This weather is always harder to deal with in cities, with so many hard surfaces to prevent the soil from absorbing water. So flooding often happens when the storm drains block with rubbish.

The last time we had storms this bad here we lost part of the roof. Let’s hope that the kludgy insurance company repairs will last.

[Yastreb]

Róisín, you'll be happy to know that we didn't get any thunderstorms, though the rain was heavy (it was much worse out in the countryside if the weather radar can be trusted).

[thorny]

Hope your roof is still on, Róisín!

Here the air is full of smoke from wildfires in Canada several hundred miles to the north. It's so dark that I keep thinking it's going to pour, though no rain's expected. I don't want to think of what it must be like in the area of the fires --

[Keep Looking]

We've also had a lot of heavy rain here in Western Australia, with some lightning as well. Some areas even got enough hail that it made the ground white (we got a bit of hail, but not too much). I've been safe so far, but I do remember driving on Sunday the roads were extremely wet, and a car in front of me splashed up enough water that it completely covered my windscreen. Thankfully I was driving very slowly due to the conditions! Thankfully the roads I was driving on weren't flooded so much they were undriveable.

Róisín, I hope you stay safe with the thunderstorms going over your area! And wishing health and safety to everyone in northeastern America right now with all the fires.

[Róisín]

We are still okay, just damp, cold, and kept awake by the storm. Just as well that I was prepared for power outages. We had several lengthy outages of power, phone systems and internet. I am about to make dinner while the power is still on. Be careful in the flooding, Keep Looking! It only takes a few inches of fast moving water to slide a car off the road, far less than you might think!

thorny, those fires sound nasty! I have seen news photos of how thick the smoke is where you are, with the fires all the way up in Canada! Keep safe, everyone.

[thorny]

Glad you're OK and hope your power stays on!

Air considerably better by now though not entirely clear. Pretty much all the news that comes up on my screen is focusing on the effect of the fires on the USA. It's Canada that's on fire, guys, wanna talk some about the effect in Canada?!

-- as near as I can tell, the areas burning don't have a high human population, and no humans were dead from the fires at least the last I looked, but a number of people have had to evacuate. The effect overall on the forests including their wild inhabitants seems unclear -- fires are normal in that ecosystem, apparently, but not anywhere near so many of them at once. And there's a lot of fire season yet to come.

[Róisín]

Thanks mate! And yeah, I had wondered why so much focus on the smoke as it affects the USA and so little on the forest ecology being damaged. A lot of the area burning is water catchment which will ultimately affect places a lot further south of the burned areas. Sadly, not much focus on the broad ecology.

[Cancvas]

midwestmutt, those look very tasty! Something I try to teach foraging classes is to tell true morels from false morels. Fortunately we don’t have many false morels around here.

Strange... false morel (Gyromitra Esculenta) is considered delicacy in Finland. Of course not to be eaten raw, as its deadly poisonous, but boiled minimum two times, for for 5 minutes to removve toxin. We had good catch this year, something like three or four kgs (boiled).

[wavewright62]

Hey, Cancvas, good to see you again!